Click the Tag for all other chapters
2
“What the fuck do you mean, get ready for a mission, Duke? We aren’t even a full team. Shit, Boss, there’s not even anybody here but me and Tank! I mean, if you want to count Ramirez, but he’s the doc, for Chrissakes. He barely even knows how to shoot!”
“Raptor, if I want any shit outta you, I’ll squeeze your fuckin’ head. Now get Tank and meet me in the goddamn briefing room in ten. I’ll take care of making sure you’re at full strength before you roll out.” Duke glared down at her, and after a few seconds under that withering stare, she turned and took off down the hallway, her brown braid flopping behind her.
Finally. After all this time, she was finally going to see some action. Who gives a shit if it was just her and Tank? That was fine, she was used to working with the big lummox, and she trusted him to keep her safe. Well, as safe as she could be, given the kind of things TECH Ops teams were usually deployed to. She’d been waiting through a year of physical therapy, then six months of combat retraining, then another six months of specialized TECH training with her new arms, legs, and enhancements. Two years of living in The Bunker, the name they all used when talking about Fort Powell, an underground base in the foothills of Eastern Tennessee.
Two years of sparring, target practice, and lectures on everything from Ancient Military Theory to Rommel’s deployments in World War II. She felt like Duke had crammed four years of West Point into her head in two years, plus training for the Olympics at the same time. But she was finally ready, or Duke was finally so desperate that he couldn’t wait to get the other two team members they needed rebuilt and trained up, so he was just throwing them out to the wolves.
Calm down, girl, she told herself. It’s probably just some BS public relations junket or some kind of dog and pony show for the Appropriations Committee. But that was fine. She’d take it. Anything to get out of the Bunker for more than the couple hours topside training time they got every day.
Sheila rounded a corner and banged on Tank’s door. “Get up, you big idiot! We’ve got a mission!”
The door slid open seconds later and Colin “Tank” Dudley filled the frame. The former tight end, former pro wrestler, former bodyguard, former Judo instructor and current only other member of TECH Ops Team Delta stood in front of the door, buck naked. He was a huge man, heavily muscled, and hung like a horse. Sheila shook her head. Answering the door naked was one of Tank’s favorite pranks. It didn’t work out so well for him when a couple of Pentagon generals toured the facility, especially since one of those generals was a woman who didn’t find anything funny about Tank’s junk. Duke had the heavy gunner washing all the base dishes for a month after that stunt. But it’s not like they could fire him. Not with half a billion dollars in tech hard-wired into his body.
“Put away your pistol, Tank. We’re gonna need heavy guns for whatever we’re doing today,” Sheila said. She turned away to walk back down the hall, talking over her shoulder as she went. “Meet me in the motor pool in five.”
“I gotta take a dump, Raptor. I just fuckin’ woke up.”
“Shit fast, Tank, then get your gigantic ass moving!”
***
Tank stomped into the motor pool ten minutes later, buttoning a black tactical shirt over his thick torso. Duke stood at the front of the room at parade rest, not moving, not speaking, not even acknowledging the big gunner’s entrance until Tank stepped up beside Sheila and snapped off one of the worst salutes Sheila had ever seen. Tank was a good one to have in a fight, but nobody was ever going to mistake him for a trained military man. Discipline wasn’t exactly his thing, to say the least.
“You’ve got a mission,” Duke started.
“Fuckin’ finally, boss. I mean no disrespect, but goddamn we’ve been down here a long time. I’m really fucking tired of shooting at targets and beating up practice dummies. And Marines,” Tank said with a sideway grin at Sheila.
“Fuck you, Tank,” Sheila replied with a smile.
“Anytime, anywhere, Raptor,” Tank shot back, his easy grin never wavering.
Sheila sometimes marveled at Tank’s good humor. The man was only standing thanks to the work of TECH Ops team, having suffered a serious spinal injury when a deranged fan sent a bomb in a flower box to the singer he was guarding. The singer made the front page of Newsweek for her terrible experience while Tank got a motorized wheelchair and a very tiny severance package for literally falling on a grenade.
But he never said a bad word about anybody. Not the superstar that fired him, not the manager that screwed him out of tons of money, not the tabloids that reported the explosion as the fault of poor private security, ensuring that he’d never work again, even if he wasn’t paralyzed from the neck down by the damage. Then TECH Ops came along and built him a new spine, and hard-wired an enhanced titanium exoskeleton to it, essentially making him stronger than the Incredible Hulk.
“If I ever want to fuck a toaster, Tank, you’ll be the first cyborg I call.”
“Just think about it, Raptor, we could make little Terminator babies, and they could grow up to be governor of California!”
“If you two are quite fucking finished, I’ll proceed with the mission brief,” Duke said.
“Sorry, Sir,” Sheila said.
Tank said nothing, but he did at least fall silent. Duke went on. “Delta Team is to provide backup and crowd control reinforcement for Alpha and Bravo team at the convention center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“All three teams, sir? What’s going on?” Sheila asked.
Duke glared at the woman, then went on. “The VFW National Conference is tomorrow, and the centerpiece of the event is a televised Presidential debate, right there in the biggest ballroom in the building. With both candidates there, we need to secure all exits, and keep an eye on the crowd.”
“Isn’t that what the Secret Service is supposed to do, sir?” Sheila asked.
“We have received some very credible intelligence that this event may be a target, and since we have some very specific assets, the determination was made to use them in assisting the Secret Service.” Duke replied.
“And if they’re lucky, they’ll never even know we’re there, right Duke?” The new voice came from the door, where Evan Rogers leaned against the frame. Evan, known as “Cap” or “Captain America” to the other team members, was the leader of Alpha Team. Alpha Team was the longest-serving and most capable of all the TECH Ops teams, and Cap was the Alpha dog of Alpha Team. He looked like his namesake, tall, blonde, with sparkling blue eyes and a smile that made most women’s knees go all watery.
Sheila cocked an eyebrow at him. “What are you doing in our briefing, Cap?”
“Just checking in on you, Birdie,” he replied with a wink.
“It’s Raptor, Cap. I think Duke has our brief well in hand. So have a nice day.”
“Oh, you too, Raptor. Have fun with your new squad.” The good-looking man turned and walked off, whistling.
“What is your problem with him, Raptor?” Tank asked. “I like Evan.”
“Tank, you like everybody.” The big man shrugged, then nodded. “I don’t have a problem with Evan, I just don’t fall for his fake smiles and quick one-liners. And he doesn’t like me because I won’t kiss his ass or fuck him, and that puts me in pretty damn rare company around this place.”
“That it does, Raptor,” Duke agreed. “That it does. But back to the point. Your team will be providing backup. You will cover the freight entrances and the service hallway outside the ballroom. Beta Team will provide a visible security presence inside the room, while Alpha Team will be stationed in the lobby to scan people as they come into the facility.”
“And to be out in front where the TV cameras are,” Sheila muttered.
“PR is a part of the gig, Raptor, and Captain Rogers is very good at it,” Duke said. “He is the Mission Leader. You are the leader of Team Delta, but your job is to put your team in place where Cap directs, and fulfill the orders that he gives you. Is that clear?” Duke put a little extra steel in his voice.
“Yes, sir,” Sheila said, and saluted.
“Yeah, I don’t know…” Tank drawled. “I mean, what if his orders are stupid, like to stand on one leg for half an hour, or something like that?”
“You saying you can’t stand on one leg for half an hour, Tank?”
“I weighed two hundred eighty pounds before the government riveted all this titanium to my ass. I haven’t been on a scale in a year, because they all break, but I figure I probably weigh at least five hundred pounds with all this metal.”
“More like eight if you have your weapon and ammunition,” Duke said. “And if you don’t have a weapon and ammunition on you, what’s the damn point of you being there?”
“Yeah, I ain’t the guy you send in to negotiate,” Tank agreed. “My point is, I ain’t the most graceful little gazelle you got in this outfit, so I’m not the dude to stand on one leg. That’s all I’m saying.”
Duke sighed, and Sheila could almost see the words “fucking civilians” roll across his eyes. “Tank, I’ll tell you what. If Cap tells you to stand on one leg, you have my permission to ignore that order, and to tell him I told you so. But any other thing he tells you to do, you do it. Sound fair?”
“I guess it’ll have to to do. When do we leave?”
“As soon as the rest of your team arrives. Which should be right about…” Duke’s voice trailed off as a pair of men walked into the room.
One of them, the shorter man, carried himself with the quiet grace and confidence of a man who has seen combat, who has walked through some serious shit and come out the other side. Sheila’s eyes ran up and down the trim Latino’s form, trying to decide if she could tell which of his parts were cybernetic, and which were “factory,” as the crew tended to call the body parts they had been born with. She couldn’t tell from across the room, the prosthetics were that good. No limp, nothing hanging strangely, just a strong man walking with confidence.
The other guy looked like trouble on two legs, Sheila thought at once. And not the fun and entertaining kind of sweaty trouble that Evan Rogers could certainly be. This one was weaselly trouble, tall, skinny, with a mousy brown ponytail and scraggly beard. It was one thing to be a TECH Ops team member and not be military. That happened, and some of those guys turned out okay. Tank had never gone through basic or eaten an MRE in his life, and he was fine. But this guy, he looked like ten miles of bad road. The kind of guy you did not want to share a foxhole with.
“You Duke?” The stocky man said.
“That’s right.”
“Pablo Guerrero, sir.” He stopped a few feet before he got to Sheila and Tank and saluted. Sheila and Duke returned the salute. Tank, of course, being Tank, flashed the new arrival a peace sign and a quiet “wassup” instead.
“Guerrero,” Duke said. “This is Sheila Hewson,” Sheila nodded. “And—“
“Tank Dudley,” Guerrero said. “I recognize you, man. Your match at WrestleWar a couple years ago was epic, man.”
Tank grinned and shook the new guy’s hand. “That was a fun one, man. Until I came off the top of the cage and broke my leg. That shit kinda ruined my weekend.”
“I bet. But you’re all healed up? They fixed you?” The smaller man asked.
“That shit just made me limp, and guaranteed I was out of the wrestling business for good. The grenade in Katy Perry’s dressing room, that bought me this.” Tank turned around and lifted his shirt, showing the exoskeleton fused into his spinal column. The metal followed his spine perfectly, and articulated at every connecting point.
“Thanks to this thing, I’m not just good as new, I’m better than ever,” Tank said.
“Brilliant, the six million dollar idiot. Could I please go back to prison now? These people are worse than Leavenworth TV.” The skeletal man with the ponytail looked at the crew with undisguised disdain.
“I can send you back to Leavenworth, Landan, but I’ll have to take all my tech back first. So if you like having two working arms, two good eyes and a skull not fractured in six places, I think you need to keep your cybernetic mouth shut.” Duke folded his arms and stared down the skinny man.
“Team, this is Viper, aka Kelvin Landan. He’s an asshole, a thief, and an unrepentant criminal—“
“Stop, you’ll make me blush,” Landan said.
“But he’s also the best hacker I’ve ever seen,” Duke continued. “He’s barely qualified with every firearm we’ve put in his hands, but stick him in front of a keyboard, and he’s a goddamn Mozart.”
“Mozart was a pussy,” Landan said under his breath, but loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Sergeant Hewson is your team lead. Her call sign is Raptor. Do not call her anything other than Raptor over comm. Do not call anyone by anything other than their call sign over comm. Some of the people on other teams may have people they care about.”
“Unlike us,” Landan said.
“Excuse me?” Sheila asked.
“Well, given his word choice, we’re obviously the orphan team. The misfits, the abnormal ones. We’re not here to protect the country for our fair-haired sons and daughters. You’re here out of some misguided sense of duty, just like G.I. Pedro over here. The big idiot is here because they told him he could punch things if he signed, and it gets me out of working in the prison gift shop.”
Sheila looked at Duke, whose blank face gave absolutely nothing and everything away.
Duke continued. “Tank is your heavy weapons specialist and door breacher. His job is to knock things down with extreme force. I would strongly suggest you not accept his invitations to spar.”
Tank smiled, and Sheila remembered the last greenie who stepped into the ring with Tank. It took him a month to get his cybernetic arm reattached.
“Mr. Guerrero’s call sign is Lone Star. He—“
Guerrero cleared raised his hand. Duke nodded to him. “I’m actually from Oklahoma, not Texas.”
“Close enough, Lone Star,” Duke said, obviously considering the matter closed.
“Umm…” Guerrero started, but Landan reached out and put a hand on his elbow.
“Dude, be glad they didn’t name you Taco Max or something really racist. Take the Texas BS and call it a win.”
“Lone Star is your distance shooter. His cybernetic eye allows him to make shots from a great distance.”
“And I hack things. With a computer, or with Elizabeth,” Landan smiled and produced a folding razor as if from nowhere. Duke and Lone Star took a step back. Sheila wanted to, but wouldn’t let herself.
“You named your razor?” She asked.
“I name all my favorite tools. Want to see the one I call Big Boy?” Viper said with a smirk.
“That depends. Does Big Boy brush his teeth, or did he learn hygiene from you?” Sheila shot back.
“I like a woman that will play back.”
“One thing you need to learn. Viper, and you need to learn it fast,” Sheila said, stepping up to the skinny man and extending a razor-sharp titanium talon from each finger on her right hand, just inches from Viper’s face. “I don’t play.”
